Opinion | A War of Choice Does Not Make Us Safer

Look, the first mission of a president is to keep Americans safe. In this case, I fear that President Trump, by embarking on a war of choice —— “The United States military began major combat operations in Iran.” he instead has made us less safe and may be putting Americans at risk for months or years to come. “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war.” We’re now at war with Iran. President Trump says that the aim is nothing less than the overthrow of the ayatollahs. “A vicious group of very hard, terrible people.” We’ll see how things go and certainly I’ve seen firsthand how unpopular the regime is on the ground, how frustrated ordinary Iranians are by the corruption, the hypocrisy, the repression and the economic incompetence of the regime. So maybe he’s right that they will rise up and overthrow the ayatollahs. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.” But I think it’s a mistake to make war on the basis of best-case scenarios. We’re unlikely to achieve our objectives, in part because air wars usually don’t actually succeed in toppling regimes. After all, President Biden and President Trump together spent $7 billion trying to overthrow the relatively weak, poorly armed Houthis in Yemen. And they failed at that. I think one of the things we should have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan is that there are some wars that you are forced to enter of necessity. There are others that you undertake as a choice. But when you have seen war and witnessed the bloodshed, you think it should be a very, very last resort. And instead, I fear we have tumbled into this abyss without thinking through the ramifications. And I’m afraid that here we’re drifting toward a war, because President Trump had seen success in Venezuela and elsewhere and thought he could again achieve his objectives easily. So put that together, and what do you have? You have a war that is certainly not guaranteed to meet its objectives of overthrowing the regime. You have a war that creates real risks for Americans. And one where there was an alternative path of diplomacy that we had not exhausted. And that feels to me a painful echo of what happened in 2003.